Applications to research positions

In 2015-2016, I applied to permanent computer science research and teaching positions in
France. As I did so, I was surprised to see that, in most circumstances, there
was very little public information available about the application process, and
important clues had to be gathered by word of mouth, rumors, and indirect
questions to jury members. I found this a bit problematic at the time, and thought
it would be helpful if former candidates would post their application material
online, so that other candidates can know where to start and what to expect.

As I am done with applications for now, this page is my attempt to make this
happen. It presents the various applications I did, the documents that I
submitted (with some details anonymized), some pointers and notes and contextual
information, and answers to questions which I obtained at the time. The page is
written in English to help international candidates, but most of the documents
are in French.

Disclaimer: This page only reflects my personal opinion. It
may become outdated as the rules of these competitions evolve.
I am certainly not the most qualified or authoritative person to tell you about
these topics, I just thought that it could be useful to someone to produce a
brain dump of my experience with them. No information posted on this page has
any official status and none of it was approved by any of the institutions
mentioned. Don't forget to use your best judgement.

Also, this page is not intended as a serious criticism of how these competitions
are run. Quite frankly, I think the main problem about them lies somewhere else,
namely: the overall number of available researcher positions is ridiculously
insufficient. More details at the end.

I applied to a CNRS CR2 position in section 6. I was preselected but I was not
ranked in the admissibility list.

CNRS
is France's largest governmental research organisation. Among its various job
application mechanisms
(including vacancies for administrative staff, research engineers, etc.),
it organizes a yearly competitive
examination for researcher positions at various levels.
These highly coveted positions carry no teaching obligation and (traditionally)
little administrative oversight, except that of handing in a regular activity
report roughly every 2.5 years (details
here). The salaries of
CNRS are fixed by law: they depend on the level and your former career, and include
various bonuses (Prime d'encadrement doctoral et de recherche, Prime
d'excellence scientifique, etc.): as of 2016 a new researcher at the lowest pay
grade can hope for around 2000 EUR/month after tax.
CNRS positions are fonctionnaire positions, meaning that CNRS researchers are
directly employed by the French state.
As of 2016, the competition formally opens on December 1st, and closes in early
January, although of course applicants who are in the know will usually get started
in October-November.

At the right time of year, the offers are posted
here. They are
sorted by "Section": the sections most relevant to computer scientists are 6
(essentially: fundamental computer science and some other things) and 7 (signal
processing, image processing, language processing, robotics, and other things);
the boundary between the two is often blurry. You can apply to both if it makes
sense.

The contests are then ranked depending on the kind of job. From most senior to
least senior, they are "DR2" (directeur de recherche de 2e classe), "CR1"
(chargé de recherche de 1re classe), "CR2" (chargé de recherche de 2e
classe). Update: CR1 and CR2 have now been merged as of 2017 into "CRCN"
(chargé de recherche de classe normale) and a new class "CRCE" (chargé de
recherche de classe exceptionnelle) has been created, to which CRCNs can be
promoted. As per section 6's
recommendations,
CR2 positions are typically intended for people with 7 years or less
of research activity, counted since the
beginning of their PhD (and excluding career interruptions, e.g., having a child).
There may be some special contests with a position
that comes with some constraints, either thematic or geographic. Independently
from this, some positions of a
contest may be assigned "in priority" to some themes, although these
recommendations are not always followed. In practice, your application should
target one or more of these contests (e.g., "06/03" is a contest): if you fit
one of the themes you can mention it in your application, but it's the same
application no matter the theme(s) you are focusing (if any).

The application process is entirely done online. The only official source of informations
about the application is the CNRS
website. In
practice, however, you should also look at the non-official information posted
by the juries of the sections to which you apply, e.g., the current websites of
section 6 and section 7. These
websites often contain important information from the section to the candidates,
and they also present the jury members: it is a good idea to look at the jury
members, to try to guess which ones will review your file, and make sure that it is framed
in a way which will suit them. (People in the jury whom you know personally or
with whom you have worked will usually declare themselves in a conflict of
interest and will not participate to the selection process for you.)

When submitting your file, you will indicate to which laboratories and teams you
will like to be assigned. Indeed, CNRS researchers are commonly assigned to
research teams in universities that have a joint lab with CNRS, in what is
called an unité mixte de
recherche.
You will need the UMR number of your host laboratories when applying: search for
it online or ask the teams for help.
The
recommendations
of section 6 indicate you should have at least two proposed host laboratories.
Rumor has it that it is essentially impossible to apply to a host laboratory
where you did your PhD, or where your PhD advisor has moved (though there have
been some exceptions). In any case, it is
common knowledge that you should already be in touch with your proposed host
teams when submitting your online application. Usually, well before December, candidates will meet the
members of their target teams and discuss their application, and laboratories will decide on which candidates to
support. It is essentially useless to request affiliation to a laboratory or
team if the team and laboratory do not already know you and support you, because
it would put you at a disadvantage compared to candidates who have this support.

For the first phase of the process, i.e., the online applications, here are
the required documents:

Documentation about your PhD defense, because a PhD is required to apply.
Depending on your exact defense date, it may be possible to apply even if
you do not have defended your PhD when you submit your file, provided that
you are scheduled to defend in the coming weeks/months. This was my case: I
submitted the application file in January 2016 with my PhD defense scheduled
for March 14, 2016, and I was still preselected. Instead of the requested
documents about my PhD defense, I submitted a letter
with the additional documents mentioned, and another
letter to justify that my defense reports did not exist
yet.

A résumé, insisting on my experience abroad (because postdoc experience
abroad is very important but I didn't really have it).

A list of publications: I do not know whether the
headings that I used are the expected ones. You will additionally have to enter some
numerical information about your academic production on the application website, as well as three
of your best publications (to be considered by the jury).

A research project. The document usually describes a
long-term vision of your future research, with short-term and longer-term
objectives, along with information indicating why you are the right person to carry
this research, how it integrates to your existing research, and yet how
different it is. It should also explain why your candidate host teams are the
right place for you to pursue this project, in terms of collaborations,
opportunities, etc. My project was probably longer than average, and shorter
projects may be preferable. Importantly, and somewhat unexpectedly, this research project is
non-binding, by which I mean that if you are admitted no one will ever check
that you are actually following the project. Think of it as a sort of
storytelling exercise.

Recommendation letters. These should not be submitted on the application
website, but sent separately. See, e.g., the
recommendations
of section 6, in particular the recommendation of having at most 3 letters,
though the specifics may vary depending on the sections.
Letters can be sent directly by
the authors; when applying I asked my PhD supervisor to regroup them and send
them. I recall that there was a specific naming convention for the
PDF files when sending
such letters. Rumor has it that these letters may be considered even if sent
after the deadline for online applications, although of course it is safer to
send them on time.

It is customary for candidates to request some feedback from their potential host
teams about their application file, in particular the project and how they would
integrate to the team. It is also customary for candidates to ask former
candidates whom they know, so that they can have more examples of application
documents.
Candidates can choose to disclose their order of preference among their requested
host laboratories, or not; of course it is unavoidable that there is usually a
fair amount of bluffing between all involved parties at this stage...

For the second phase of the process, a preselection list is established by
each section. All candidates on this list proceed to the next phase, the others are
eliminated for that section. This usually narrows down the pool, e.g., to around 20-30 applicants
for CR2. (Historically, this phase did not exist, so the section had to
interview all applicants, including those that they did not want to consider.
Now that sections can pre-select applications, they are using this power more
and more, so the historical trend has been for the number of preselected people
to decrease over time.)

The third phase of the process is an audition, for all preselected
candidates. The week of the auditions should be publicized sufficiently in
advance for you to make travel plans (although it is common to hear the
information in advance from your favorite non-official sources...). Later, a
schedule is established and you should receive an official appointment. The
section should indicate information about how the auditions will proceed:
for section 6, it included a presentation for 15 minutes, then questions for 15
minutes, but this often changes from one year to the other (expect instructions
in your "convocation" or from non-official sources again). For the audition, you will need:

A set of slides, which should present your previous
work, your research proposal, and the teams in which you would like to
integrate; of course it should be well-rehearsed and carefully timed.

An optional update to your file, for
instance, if you have had new publications accepted since when it was
submitted. In practice, I think the jury only cared about the new
publications, not about other kinds of new information.

In 2016, these documents had to be on a USB key, to be brought with you on the
audition. (Of course, bring several, in case there is a hardware problem.) No
dress code was specified: I wore a suit, but most of the candidates I saw did
not.

The audition is not supposed to be the main criterion on which the jury will
rank people: in principle, the paper file should not be entirely disregarded
once you get to the audition stage. Of course, in practice, your live
performance probably has a significant impact.
As the CNRS contest is ridiculously competitive, I think it is safe to say that
you need an extremely good file and extremely good audition and extremely
good fortune to get in, unless maybe if you trump the others on some criterion
(think settling P vs NP).

At the end of the auditions, an admissibility ranking is issued by the
jury of each section. The ranking is a sorted list of some subset of the preselected people,
and it may include ties; the number of ranked candidates is usually greater than the
number of positions. Anyone not on this list is eliminated for that section
(this was my case), everyone on the list proceeds to the next phase.

The fourth phase of the process is that, in mid-June, final admission
rankings are issued. This is where it gets complicated: in addition to the
sections, CNRS is split into
institutes.
Sections 6 and 7 are attached to the Institut des sciences de l'information et
de leurs interactions (INS2I), and it is this institute
which establishes the final admission list, by picking a subset of the
admissibility list and some order among this list. (It is not exactly clear
whether the order on the subset may be something else than the restriction of
the original order to the subset, i.e., if the INS2I has more options than
merely eliminating some candidates.) In particular, the admission list may even be shorter
than the number of available positions (in which case some of them will not be
staffed). The tradition used to be that the INS2I would not change the lists
established by the sections, but in 2016 the lists were substantially changed
for complicated reasons, so candidates should now expect possible surprises at
this stage.

Once the final admission ranking is established, an offer is extended to
candidates, in the order of the list. The question of choosing the host team of
accepted candidates is
usually settled through informal discussion between candidates and the CNRS
administration: it is not unheard of
that the location preferences of a candidate would have an impact on their final
ranking.

I applied to Inria as CR2 in the centers of
Lille,
Saclay, and
Sophia (actually in Montpellier).
I was preselected at Lille and Saclay, ranked second in Lille and fourth in
Saclay on the admissibility lists, and was ranked in the top-2 at Lille in the
admission list.

Inria
is a French research institute which specializes in computer science. It also
organizes a yearly competitive examination for researcher positions at various
levels. The rankings (CR2, CR1, DR2) are the same as for CNRS above, Inria
researchers are also employed by the state (fonctionnaire), and the pay grade
is similar to CNRS (with some minor possible differences). Inria positions are
also pure research positions with no teaching obligation. However, the cultures
of Inria and CNRS differ in some respects:

CNRS sees researchers as individuals attached to some existing teams; Inria
asks researchers to be in Inria teams, and manages things at the level of the
teams. The positive side is that larger projects have more institutional backing
and can have better dynamics. Another important positive side is that there is
some funding in Inria at the level of the team (though I hear there is a
difference between the "équipes" (teams) and "équipes-projet" (project-teams) in
this regard.) The negative side is that it is harder to do
things entirely independently, and you need to spend time preparing documents
describing the goals of the team, etc.

Inria encourages applied research, in particular industrial collaborations,
(even though pure theoreticians at Inria are not unheard of); CNRS has no such
focus and maybe less industrial ties.

Inria is organized in regional centers which have some degree of independence,
and moving between the centers is possible but not automatically approved.
CNRS is a national organization and relocating to different teams across
France is rumored to be routinely accepted if it makes scientific sense. (In
both cases, however, rumor has it that you cannot move immediately, and should
wait for a few years before applying.)

As of 2016, the Inria competition formally opens in January, and closes in
mid-February, although of course applicants who are in the know will usually get
started earlier. The positions are assigned to each center; there are usually
one or two CR2 positions available in each center. The non-Parisian centers are rumored
to be less selective, but of course it depends on who is applying where.

The application process of Inria, surprisingly enough, has nothing to do with
CNRS. A Word/LaTeX template is provided for you to fill, with a mandatory
structure that you must follow. So there are less doubts about how it should be
done, but you have little freedom to evade questions about things that you would
rather not talk about (e.g., software development, or industrial collaborations).
Another difference is the length: the summary of your past work is
essentially limited to a one-page summary and three one-page "contribution sheets", and your research
project is limited to 2 pages (again, its contents are not binding).
Further, Inria applications
must be sent by registered paper mail, not submitted online, although in
addition to the paper applications you should also email an electronic copy
of the application document to an email address which is indicated.
Sending the paper application is mandatory and it has happened that candidates
were disqualified because of issues when using postal mail.
Last, as Inria is
organized in regional centers, you apply to each center separately, and send a
separate document for each: you can have, e.g., a different research project
for each center; but you can also re-use the same project and only change the
explanation of why it would integrate well with the team, as I did. It's
probably better to have different projects if it is required to fit better to
the themes of the various teams where you apply, and to possible collaborations
with its members; the only downside to having different projects for each team
is that it takes more time for you to prepare the application files.

As some laboratories are joint between universities, Inria, and CNRS, it is
entirely possible that you will find yourself applying to the same team through
three independent processes: Inria, CNRS, and maître de conférences (see the
corresponding section below).

For the first phase of the process, i.e., the online applications, here are
the documents I submitted.
It was possible to attach a photo, but I did not do so.

Source archive of the application. Very messy. Do
not re-use as-is, as the format seems to have changed.

If I remember correctly, an evaluation committee in early March at the
national level decides on which files are eligible to compete. Again I had the
problem that I had not defended my PhD yet, but it is possible for this
committee to accept an application even without a PhD. Candidates which are not
kept at this stage are eliminated altogether.

The second phase of the process is that each Inria center decides on which
candidates are preselected. Candidates who are not preselected for a center are
eliminated for that center; candidates who are preselected for a center will
have an audition in this center. The planning for the preselection list and for the
audition periods is different for each center, but auditions in 2016 were in
April-May. (As for CNRS, you will probably want to find out quickly about this,
to arrange your travel plans.)

The third stage consists of the auditions.
They usually include a presentation and questions, similarly to
CNRS (see above): the duration of each depends on the center (usually it's
around half an hour total). For some centers, you will have to email your presentation in
advance. I was auditioned at Lille and Saclay, so here are:

Shortly after the auditions, each
Inria center establishes an admissibility ranking. Candidates not in the list
for a center are eliminated for this center.

The fourth phase of the process is that, in mid-June 9roughly at the same
time as for CNRS), a final admission
ranking is published. There is one ranking per center, but these rankings are
all decided
nationally, and the lists usually vary wildly between the admissibility and
admission rankings. In particular, the committee
usually modifies the list to ensure that each candidate is only admitted to one
center, so they can decide who they want to send where. Many candidates are
routinely eliminated at this stage for inscrutable reasons, no matter their
admissibility ranking. Admissible candidates are usually informally asked about their
preferences, to be given as input to this mysterious process. (I was asked for
such preferences.)

Offers are then extended from the various centers to the candidates in
descending order of the admission list for this center. Positions include a
salary estimation, and candidates usually have 2 weeks to accept or decline
them.

Positions of maître de conférences (tenured associate professor) are
half-research, half-teaching (with a reference amount of 192 hours/year of
teaching in "équivalent TD"), with a
pay grade fixed by law and similar to CNRS/Inria above (including some
primes)
and a fonctionnaire
status. They require a diploma known as the qualification (more on this
below). They usually open in March as part of the session
synchronisée. There are exceptions, however: I applied to Télécom
ParisTech and none of the previous points in
italics were true! Other well-known exceptions include, e.g., the École
polytechnique.

The normal process is that you apply for the qualification in
November-December, and then apply to positions on the
Galaxie
system. However, the specific application process differs among the
universities. I will not talk about this as I have not done it.

The position to which I applied in Télécom was posted a bit later than the
session synchronisée, on Télécom's
system, in May.
I provided the following documents:

Applying to research positions in France is a very competitive process. To some
extent, this is healthy; but I do not think that the current state of affairs is
reasonable. Candidates spend an excessive amount of effort to optimize their
applications and to guess and follow the rules of the game, and most importantly the
number of available positions is simply not sufficient to accommodate all
candidates who would deserve to obtain one. The French system, after having
spent significant amounts of money to educate promising future researchers, ends
up discouraging too many of them, who will have to do jobs that they enjoy less,
leaving lots of important research undone. This is especially infuriating when
one sees, e.g., that the state allocates more than the budget of CNRS to a
confusingly named Crédit d'impôt
recherche,
a wide-ranging tax exemption for companies, with only a tenuous connection to
research, and which has attracted
significantcriticism.

This sorry situation should be kept in mind by applicants and interested
parties, but of course it is also a sore loss for France in general.